Telecommunication systems such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and private branch exchanges (PBXs) are generally well known. The PSTN is now considered to be a digital system that is capable of carrying data at a theoretical speed of 64 kilobits per second (kbps). Despite many enhancements to the capacity, efficiency and performance that has undergone PSTN over the years, the voice quality is still limited to something less than “true voice” quality for several reasons. How the PSTN delivers voice from one telecommunication terminal to another is the culprit behind limited voice quality.
In transmitting voice from one telecommunications terminal to another several transformations take place. The caller's acoustic voice waves are converted to electrical analog signals by the microphone in the telephone handset of the near end telecommunications terminal which is connected to a central office in the caller's neighborhood through a subscriber line interface circuit. Latter performs duties such as powering the telecommunications terminal, detecting when the caller picks up or hangs up the receiver, and ringing the telecommunications terminal when required. A coder/decoder (codec) converts the analog voice signals to a digital data stream for easy routing through the network and delivery to the central office, located in the recipient's (far end) neighborhood, where the digital data stream is converted back into electrical analog signals. Then the handset speaker of the far end telecommunications terminal finally converts the analog signals to acoustic waves that are heard by the listener. The same process occurs in the opposite direction allowing the caller hearing the recipient voice.
One of the reasons the PSTN limits voice quality is to increase the call capacity of the network by reducing the data rate of each call. The PSTN confines each voice digital data stream to 64 kbit/s. This is achieved by sampling the voice signals at a rate of 8 kHz, and filtering out any frequencies less than 200 Hz and greater than 3.4 kHz. Amplitude compression is also used according to some so called μ-Law in the US or A-Law encoding in Europe resulting in an 8-bit (a byte per word), 8-kHz (sampling rate) stream of data. This amplitude compression is part of a pulse code modulation (PCM) encoding techniques according to the ITU-T Recommendation G.711. Reversing this process at the receive end reproduces the caller's voice but without the original quality. This compression and expansion (companding) process of the G.711 algorithm adds distortion to the signal and gives a phone conversation its distinctive “low fidelity” quality. It is directly related to the used narrow bandwidth of about 3.5 kHz.
In lieu of PCM codecs, digital voice/speech codecs may be utilized by a telecommunication system to transmit audio signals in a different manner than the conventional PCM encoding techniques. Assuming that a suitable transmit bandwidth is available, such audio codecs can provide enhanced fidelity voice transmissions by incorporating audio characteristics such as tone, pitch, resonance, and the like, into the transmitted signal. For example, by leveraging the 64 kbps capability of current telephone networks, wideband voice codecs may be designed to provide high fidelity telephone calls in lieu of conventional audio calls that are governed by the PCM encoding protocols. Such high fidelities calls may be transmitted using a bandwidth that exceeds 3.5 kHz, e.g. 7 kHz with an increased codec sampling to 16 kHz with again a byte per sample or word.
Due to the current standards that govern telecommunications systems, audio codecs may not be universally implemented in the many central offices associated with a given telecommunication system. Accordingly, an end-to-end high fidelity speech connection may not always be achieved if either of the respective central office do not utilize compatible audio codecs. Even if both ends (near and far ends) support high fidelity speech communications, there must be a mechanism by which the central offices can communicate to determine whether (and which) wideband audio coding protocols are supported.
In EP 04290336 is described a method for providing an optimized audio quality communications session between a near end and at least a far end telecommunications terminals. Such method is based on the requirement that at least the codec of the near end telecommunications terminal is able to apply two alternative encoding techniques belonging to the same audio compression protocol. When the near end telecommunications terminal will receive a data packet from the far end telecommunications terminal after set up of the communication session during which the audio compression protocol has been set, the near end telecommunications terminal will determine out of said received data packet the encoding technique used by the far end telecommunications terminal. Such determination is performed by analyzing the content of the header of the received packet. In case the determined encoding technique is based on a different alternative encoding technique of the audio compression protocol used initially by the near end telecommunications terminal, then an adaptation will be performed. The implementation of such a method implies that in the case the codec of the far end telecommunications terminal works only using narrowband encoding technique than the codec of the near end telecommunications terminal applying by default a wideband encoding technique will fall back to a narrowband encoding technique. If those near end and far end telecommunications terminals are involved in a teleconference with a third far end telecommunications terminal itself equipped with a codec working at a sampling corresponding to a wideband encoding technique then due to the presence of a single telecommunication terminal applying narrowband encoding technique the whole teleconference will be performed using such poor narrowband encoding technique. In this context, the advantage to benefit from a telecommunications using wideband encoding technique at least between the two telecommunications terminals equipped with a codec able to apply such a sampling is simply lost.